Today is the third session in our five session introduction to urban modelling and simulation. This will be about land use models and how we construct them from elements of spatial interaction submodels. And I will illustrate a worked example. But please read last weeks lectures Lecture 3 and Lecture 4 because we didn’t finish them and they are key to today – Skim them before the lecture if you can – Lectures 5 and 6 are posted on the relevant pages. The image on the left is from an old cover of Byte magazine – which was ‘the’ computer magazine in the 1980s. It had countless images comparing computers to cities and city blocks, a fact that resonates strongly now with the idea of smart cities, another theme on this blog that is yet to be developed as a course of lectures.
Monthly Archives: January 2012
Spatial Interaction
Spatial Interaction from now on and I promised you a short piece that I had written as a general introduction but I don’t have it digitally. It is called “Spatial Interaction” in Encyclopaedia of Geographic Information Science edited by Karen Kemp, Sage, 2007, 417-419. I have the book in self-storage in Bath (don’t ask) and Paul Longley has a copy but he told me to tell you all to go the Library. UCL Library of course doesn’t even have a hard copy so Paul suggested I email Karen Kemp for the pdf. Lo and behold as soon as they woke up in Hawaii where she is, she sent me a copy of the download – yes the Encyclopaedia is online – so here is the printed download accessed by Karen from Hawaii, taken from the University of Southern California library, emailed to me for the blog. All in a couple of hours. The power of the net. Where will it end?
Introduction to Urban Models
The first session comprised an introduction to urban modelling. Essentially this introduced the term model across many different types as well as the model building process. I skipped a number of sections which I would like you to study. If you load the first lecture in the session, then look at the last few slide pages on the relationships between prices and distance and see what you think about how good the fit is. It’s terrible statistically but does it show anything? Think about the limitations of statistical fitting in terms of your intuition about the nature of the relationship. In the second lecture of the session, we skipped the sections 4 and 5 on dynamics and ABM, disaggregation. Have a quick look at these; and don’t forget to read Lowry’s Short Course in Model Design which is a must for this course.